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| Ian Duncan Smith and the DWP are once more under fire as they attempt to make fundamental changes to how benefits work. Photograph: Job Centre Plus by Andrew Writer (License) (Cropped) |
The discovery yesterday that the DWP, Department of Work and Pensions, had been faking case studies is just the latest blunder in the Conservative attempt to make a coercive shift in welfare policy (Rawlinson & Perraudin, 2015). It is the latest product of the destructive Conservative obsession with stamping out what they see as dependence generating collectivism, only to allow coercion to flourish.
The Conservatives have pressed along this course, even in the face of legal challenges (Neville, 2013), in pursuit of ideological aims. In the 1970s, the party began to adopt long abandoned elements of classical liberalism.
They absorbed these ideas - the free market, anti-state attitudes - to construct a modern conservatism. They have used low taxes, deregulation and the trimming back of the public sector to protect the interests of the modern establishment, which primarily consists of the finance sector and big business.
The general Conservative motivation is stated to be the discouragement of dependence and the encouragement of self-interest, all in order to spur innovation and individual excellence - in opposition to collectivism - that, in competition, they believe will lead to growth and advancement within the structure of, and beneficial to, the establishment (George & Wilding, 1994).
Within that structure comes the dismantling of the welfare system, even the privatising of it (Mason, 2015), all in the name of ending dependence - in this case by the introduction of greater coercion.
In these applications come the conservative twist on old liberal policies. They are made to serve a vast corporate structure, the UK as a PLC (Treanor & Elliott, 2015), an umbrella for other financial and business giants. In the process the liberist, laissez faire, economics lose whatever capacity they had to liberate and welfare loses its ability to act as a compassionate social security safety net.
Welfare, in particular, has a purpose, a social point, that is the reason it is provided by the public sector. It is supposed to be a common safety net, to which everyone contributes and from which everyone benefits. A kind of social bond, part of the thread that holds the patchwork of society together.
But as the Conservatives pursue their direction, shredding that social fabric, they replace the compassion and co-operation of welfare, with the a meagre and coercive social insurance (Mason, 2015) - based on individual contributions from individual work, highly personalised and so lacking the security offered by a social safety.
The Labour Party's unwillingness to oppose these directions hides the possibility of moving in a more progressive direction (Wintour, 2015). Society could do more to help, it could liberate the individual and end poverty. The means of achieving it is the Citizen's Income. However, only one party - the Greens - have taken it seriously, and even they had doubts about putting it front and centre of their election manifesto (Riley-Smith, 2015).
And yet, it is an idea that, at the very least, shows that a progressive alternative is possible. Citizen's Income shows that it is possible to reform welfare for the present and to do so without losing its social purpose: serving the common good.
References
Kevin Rawlinson & Frances Perraudin's 'DWP admits inventing quotes from fake 'benefits claimants' for sanctions leaflet'; in The Guardian; 18 August 2015.
Sarah Neville's 'UK’s Supreme Court rules ‘workfare’ legally flawed'; in the Financial Times; 30 October 2013.
Vic George & Paul Wilding's 'Welfare And Ideology'; Harvester Wheatsheaf; 1994. [Buy Now]
Rowena Mason's 'David Cameron open to idea of workers saving up to fund own sick pay'; in The Guardian; 13 July 2015.
Jill Treanor & Larry Elliott's 'Chancellor wants UK plc to back Tories on economic record'; in The Guardian; 22 January 2015.
Patrick Wintour's 'Anger after Harriet Harman says Labour will not vote against welfare bill'; in The Guardian; 12 July 2015.
Ben Riley-Smith's 'Greens ditch citizens' income from election manifesto'; in The Telegraph; 2 February 2015.
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